Kamran Pakseresht

Paul at Visual Products is an Eclair expert- definitely can recommend them. That being said, this doesn’t immediately sound like an issue with the camera itself - Nicki is right that you want to evenly distribute the slack on each side when you push your loop in and it’s possible it got shifted when you removed the magazine and the re-engaged it later. Try shooting another 100ft roll- without ever removing the magazine, if it comes out perfect, then it’s likely operator error and you can just adjust your workflow to watch out for issues like this. And yes - I usually tell anyone looking to buy a used film camera to factor in a few hundred dollars for a CLA - just so you can ensure it’s running smoothly, quietly, and will last a long time. Because you’re in LA, you can probably save a big chunk of change in not having to ship it out by having Tyler take a look at it.

I was discussing the flicker issue with Paul from Visual Products - here is what he had to say:

Paul is amazing - he just converted my eclair ACL to Ultra 16 - has been so thorough and helpful the entire time and always very detailed in responding to questions. VP definitely gets my seal of approval.

I just ordered one on ebay - I'll try and get some designs made for them once they arrive - hopefully I can send a couple to some users on here to test as I don't have an a-minima myself.

I actually have thought about something very similar. I would like to make 200ft split reels for my eclair ACL - just to make spooling up 200ft cores simpler. if I could get my hands on one of these, I’d be more than happy to put up the designs for it - I’m not sure how they work differently from a split reel (do these ones open up in the same way?) - does the A-minima require these reels or can the A-minima use simple cores as well?

There seems to be a lot of negative comments towards Nikons video offerings - but everything I’ve read about their latest cameras (Z8 and Z9) is that they are incredibly capable and actually competitive with the other cameras in their price bracket. I had started to think that Nikon was making a bit of a comeback based on the reviews, but the comments here seem so far in the other direction that it’s confusing. I definitely assumed this to be great news for Nikon and video cameras in general.

Based on measuring the threads and experimenting with the sizes until I reached a lens cap that screwed on smoothly without excessive friction - the specs in onshape for my cap threads (the inner threads that can thread onto this mount) are: Pitch: 1mm Threads Per Inch: 25.4 The diameter of the cylinder that I ran these threads on was: 52.5mm If you read the patent - it suggest the mount is basically just a c-mount with twice the diameter (2 inches) and the same thread pitch - but while the diameter might be accurate - I'm not so sure about the thread pitch as I seemed to arrive at different results from the patent.

It's great you started a thread about this! I recently have been working on reverse engineering some of these adapters. Here is the official US patent for the mount for those interested: https://ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloadPdf/3682069 I was very motivated to create an adapter for Micro Four Thirds lenses but after actually starting to calculate it and model it - it's just not possible, there is not enough room. I think there is a possibility of a mod - where you remove the 6 screws holding the TS camera mount to the camera body and replace it with a Micro Four Thirds mount - but I will need to get a cheap/parts only ACL to test this on. I did make a 3d printable model of a cap that fits the TS mount as a starting point to all of this work - you can find it here. What type of lens mount adapters do you think are the most useful/would you most like to see?

That actually sounds like a fun project - I might give that one a shot

In my opinion, for the price you're looking to spend - buy an Eclair NPR (that's running) on Ebay for ~2k - send it to Tyler or Visual Products for a CLA (VP does a CLA for between 3 and 400 dollars) - and spend whatever is left-over on adapters and lenses. Once you have one that's been looked over by a professional (assuming it was running to begin with) - they should run well for many years to come. They are relatively quiet sync-sound cameras that are a great intro to the format if you're just trying to get up and running. At 4k - this is probably where you could realistically start. If it was me and I'd never shot on 16mm before and I could give myself advice - I'd tell myself to just buy a Arri 16s or a Beualieu R16 that was gone over by someone and already running - you can do so much with just a solid camera, you don't necessarily need sync sound to get familiar with the format and explore the medium.

I actually took a look at this one and it's in pretty bad shape - it is one of the very very early LTRs (Serial # was B76). It does not run properly (shutter just kind of lurches and then stops) and all of magazines would certainly need to be completely gone over (the rubber belts had completely disintegrated and gotten into basically everything). Definitely not a running camera and possibly a money pit if the electronics are in bad shape.

As part of my growing mission to make it simpler and more affordable to shoot on film - I whipped up a 16mm split reel design yesterday that can be easily 3D printed. I have a whole fridge full of Fuji 16mm film that I finally decided to break down into some smaller reels and having a 400ft split reel made it very simple. You can download the files here. You probably will need to flip one of them 180 degrees on the X-axis in your printing software. 0.1 mm layer height is best for the threads. On my Bambu Labs X1C it takes ~2 hours per side. Uses about 111 grams of filament so rather affordable if you're printing yourself. As always my Onshape work is totally public - so you can very easily modify this if you want to make a smaller or larger reel - here is the link. This pairs really nicely with the Short 16mm Film Rewind designs on thingiverse here, which I use for my setup (just double side taped them down to this ikea cutting board which fits nicely into my film changing tent) And for those curious - I just ran 100ft of respooled Fuji 64d that I had been storing in a fridge for the last 12 years through my Beaulieu R16. Developed in a Morse tank and it came out great (rated it at ~25 iso) Here are some close-ups of the reels:

Found the thread here. Really interesting and very cool to see this discussion for such a beautiful film. Here is quote I think you were referencing: The Tri-X results were superior in sharpness, highlight tonality and grain. Contrast was actually normal and comparable between the two. I saw the results both as prints and in a 4k DI suite at Fotokem. It's unclear how much the results were improved by the stock being Tri-X, and how much from the more moderate development. The "normal" developed double X footage showed signs of overdevelopment (especially poor highlight separation) that the 35mm Double-X did not.

Curious about that, as far as I knew The Lighthouse was shot entirely on Double-X - here is the a quote from this article about the film choices: “The results confirmed my hunch, that nothing approached the palette we were after quite like B&W negative film,” says Blaschke. “Rob and I saw that the blottier, murkier qualities of DOUBLE-X better-suited our misty, salty, visually-distressed film.”

Wanted to draw attention to a film I just saw in theaters - Divinity by Eddie Alcazar - shot almost entirely on Kodak 7266 on a super 16 Arri SR3 Incredibly stylized film, mixing all sorts of special and practical effects and even stop motion animation. Definitely worth a watch if you like seeing things originating on 16mm. I didn’t know the film was shot on 16 until after I had watched it, and originally thought it was surely shot on digital with grain added in post - but turns out it was just natural grain from the format. here is the IMDb entry for the technical aspects